–Engage

I am now in the middle of my 4th week at my new position at Symbol Technologies and I couldn’t be happier than a pig in sh*t and I really feel compelled to tell you all why, as I believe many of you are in current positions very similar to the ones I’ve been at for most of my career.

First some background

Since its been a while since I posted any historical biographic material here, it might be helpful to give you a taste of what my “design” career has been like. I think, again, many may have some similar aspects.

(You can skip the auto-biographical piece and just jump to the juice.)

I’ve been doing some sort of unofficial design since 1994 when I started coding websites for Michael Wolff and Co and his quickly failed “Your Personal Network” and “NetGuide” series of books. I quickly left (way before the crash of the MW Empire interestingly documented by Michael himself in “Burn Rate”) and moved to the advertising/interactive agency world as an HTML Designer (ah! Titles are great!). But for the next period of 5 years I bounced between Project Management/Producer positions and HTML coding jobs, the combination of which eventually got me the position of IA circa 1999 at a small but fun interactive design studio called Vizooal (now called Ivoution after Vizoola collapsed). It is here that I really believe my “Design” career began and my connections to the IA community, the User Experience profession, and my growing zealotry of design.

What happened at first is that IA for Vizoola really meant Business Analyst. We even modeled ourselves after Cambridge Technology Partners with whom we did a lot work. My role was very much parallel to whom they called a Business Analyst. But what got me thinking about design were a few things:

• working closely with the great visual designers are Vizoola
• making connections with the UX community (discovering SIGIA-L)
• Going to the C|Net Builder conference (they should bring those back) and hearing Nathan Shedroff speak for the first time.

What I learned excited me–concepts like design exploration, design research, contextual inquiry, spliced more and more into my consciousness. The other aspects of UX like usability and the technical pieces of web design seemed to already easily fit for me.

But Vizooal and the rest of the dot.com community took a turn for the worse and I was forced to leave the “design” world and headed straight inside the old guard of the software community by joining Documentum (today EMC|Software). Now, I know that sounds bad, but I think by going “inside” was really smart. I learned so much about software product lifecycles (or even what a product lifecycle even was). Being an outsider you just don’t get that. I also made great connections with engineers and learned how engineering leads innovation at a very tech savvy organization. But I still didn’t get that “design” experience. However, my move to Silicon Valley brought me closer to the heart of the UX community and culminated with the following events (making me all the hungrier for “design”):

• Attendance to the Design Expo at CHI in 2002 (pre-DUX conference)
• My own participation in DUX 2003 with an accepted paper
• The creation of the interaction architects Yahoo group – today IxDA of which I’m the VP.

I was so hungry for a design environment, but as before, my life took me further astray from it. I had to leave the Valley and move back to NYC. I took the only job I cold find and knew from the get go that I was not getting the position I hoped for. However, my passion for “Design” intensified through my active connection and work with/for IxDA. I made connections with more people and more mentors over this 3+ year period and through their advice and just care I was able to turn out a design process within a very stale business centric technology organization that I could live with. This culminated in what I consider to be an amazing re-design of a product in a process that felt akin to the “building an airplane in the air” approach that EDS is now promoting – EEK!!!

During my search for “DESIGN” I realized that my formal training in design was very limited. So, I took 2 design courses at Pratt Institute of Design in industrial design (product design and drawing for product design). This experience more than any other solidified my desire to BE a designer and was the source of a lot of my success at IntraLinks. Probably the best $617 they ever spent and they don’t even realize it (maybe now they do). It also made me a zealot Pro-Designer (think pro-Life) where Bruce Nussbaum and Jonathan Ive posters would have been pinned on my cube wall if there were such things. (Well, a real designer doesn’t have a cube, but you get my point.) I broke out weeping at the documentary about Frank Gehry, “Sketches of Frank Gehry”. Yes, my wife thinks I’m a sap, but I was moved by the beauty that comes out of his creative processes, but that’s how badly I want this for myself. That one design breakthrough. A Professor at Pratt, Bruce Hannah, has been known to tell his students, “Design a chair for Knoll, and you are set for life as a designer.” What this has meant to me is aim high and find that one big success and the rest falls into place as a designer.

The whole time at IntraLinks (the aforementioned organizations that brought me back east), a small on-demand hosted software provider, I was looking for a “real” design environment to work in. I also (for completely unrelated reasons) ideally wanted to work in an environment that mixed Industrial Design and Interaction Design.

I do have to thank the folks at IntraLinks for giving me such tremendous trust, support and latitude during this period. They allowed me to go to a lot of conferences to speak and learn, and they were fine with me having a 2nd part time job, which was the forming of IxDA. They’ll never get official credit, but they should be considered a founding sponsor of IxDA in so many ways.

And this search brought me to where I am today!!!! – Symbol Technologies (Soon to be Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility Group).

Let me tell you about this “special” place

Let me just say that this organization is everything I’ve hoped for and MORE! It is EXACTLY what I’ve been looking for. Hardware + Software in a real “DESIGN” environment and now is the time to describe those aspects that make this place so special. (Thanx for wading through all this to get here.)

After all that forward information, I think I’ll try to simplify all this (Just finished Jon Maeda’s book).

Research oriented—more than UCD
What is research? If we look at the scientific method we understand research to be the testing of a hypothesis again reality to discover a describable reality—i.e. prove it.

If we look at the social sciences, we do research to “observe” reality (no trial), so that we can describe reality as a collection of generalizations we make against our particular acknowledged point of view.

Design research is the epitome of both worlds. Before user centered ideas began creeping into the design community (way before computers) design research was more akin to design exploration. This part of design research has been lost on most of the engineering oriented software/product/management consulting/internal financial/etc. shops out there today. There is no space for creative discovery which to me is the backbone of what makes design and ergo this whole “age of innovation” what everyone is clamoring for. Yet so many places today say they are doing design, when in fact they are just conceiving of ideas and describing them.

Here at Symbol, design exploration is part of the DNA. But how does that translate to the design process?

The best example I can think of was a recent show & tell where a designer was reviewing an appearance model of a mobile computing data capture device. This rendition was a complete re-design of something that is very common in almost every major warehousing environment.

The design was particularly engaging on its own for several reasons:

1. It acculturated a design language from an adjacent product line (of even a non-related organization).
2. It recognized through accessing reams of design research that the device is multi-purposed and that those purposes can be multi-modal
3. explored a completely new set of design languages for our organization

To summarize, the design explored ideas previously not found within our organization and brought them all together within a product that the organization has familiarity and experience with.

During the “show & tell”—our informal design review to gain feedback—there was a part of the design that was creating a huge amount of discussion and division. There was severe disagreement about the issue. Our head of design at that point could have done what I expected to happen, “Ok, let’s test it and see what happens.” Rather he says, “Well, regardless of the right answer, I think we should keep this aspect of the design as is, because it is causing discussion about the issue.” Since the design was a concept design and not a production design, its purpose was to capture ideas, any and all ideas of value and to provoke discussion. It did just that and our manager encourages this process as a form of design research.

In retrospect there are so many aspects of this design that will push for answers to great questions. For example, will the design be robust enough for our standards? Will it be cost effective? And will the interface really meet the multi-modal requirements of the many different use-contexts?

My point being though that this design review acknowledged a basic tenant of “design research”—That unless you communicate the ideas they will be lost. Capturing ideas whether appropriate to the actual solution directly or some other adjacent or tangential solution is a hugely important part of design research.

Design is non-linear. What you are working on today (moving forward) may actually benefit a design that is years old and in fact resurrect it; Or … it may sit and wait for the right time to blossom in the future.

In my 13 years of doing this work I have never worked for an organization that was able to not only do this work, but prove its intrinsic value to the entire organization as it seems that Symbol has been able to do.

But there is the other side of research as well—user research. Symbol has an entire team dedicated to User Research employing a host of different methods and processes for observing, describing and then analyzing. Since this is a UX blog, I’m not going to go into too much detail about how all this is done or what value is derived from it, but believe it or not, I have never (again in 13 years) worked for an organization that in its design unit had a separate research group of about 6 people (out of department of about 20-30). This includes a marketing person who can help us create business cases for the concepts we develop.

What I will describe is to what level this works. Where the design team will get together and combine 3 datapoints and brainstorm ideas that then become user scenarios that will get their own design explorations: technology, observational data, design creativity. This is done through a series of brainstorming sessions with the goals of creating stories to tell designers and engineers to get further input, creativity and exploration.

That to me is the point of design research and why design is such a wonderful catalyst for change and innovation.

Openness
I could stop right there and say that is it. One word really says it all. But I guess I should explain a bit. To put it simply the organization is open to ideas from anyone from any part of the organization. But within the design department this is doubly true. So much so in fact there are concrete processes for expressing ideas, and these processes engage and encourage the foraging of ideas in a formal manner.

Even after only being at the organization for 3 weeks, I expressed an idea and was immediately encouraged to pursue it, using the tools made available. The tools were an aid to guide thought and creativity processes and to help organize your thoughts in a more understandable presentation so that others will be better able to understand your ideas giving them a better and more equal chance of success regardless of the source.

An organization that allows people to convert passions into workable projects to me is a key success factor for a design organization and its parent organization.

This type of openness permeates other areas. The above mentioned “show & tell” meeting is another example where people are encourage to engage the designer, and then engage each other through a conversation about the catalyzing artifact in question. Now many other organizations do this and I have experienced before, but most recently this was missing from my work life so I have learned to consider it quite precious.

Ego diminishing
While designers at Symbol usually work solo on their pieces, there is a great push to gain outreach during your creative periods to get not just feedback, but advice on the pieces you are working on. It seems that egos have disappeared in this design studio where people are on the one hand encouraged to write proposals for IDEA awards and then on the other hand work as a sole designer on a product, which usually leads to “ownership” and other ego raising qualities.

This is particularly interesting when one considers this phrase I heard recently from a recruiter: “We are looking for people who have accomplished things in their life so when they arrive here, they leave their egos behind.”

Admitting mistakes is a big deal for anyone, but to hear it from the executive levels is wonderful, especially when done with thanks to those who help point it out, and with engagement to try to figure out how to fix those mistakes. This models for everyone that mistakes are part of the process both short term (single project) and long term across product lines.

The last part of ego diminishing is in sharing. While I said most design projects seem to have a single designer at the helm (I like design vision leadership), there are projects where different players (industrial designer, researcher, ux designer [read interaction designer]) are all engaged on a single project (Industrial Designer is usually the lead), no one really cares where ideas come from. “Credit” seems to be shared across the team, thus encouraging more ideas to be generated because people have less fear about grasping ownership and care more about creating great things.

Community Involved
Symbol understands the value of encouraging community involvement in design organizations. The head of the department is very active in IDSA, and has used department budget for even sponsoring and organizing entire IDSA events.

My own involvement in IxDA and other organizations and community efforts have been encouraged. I have also seen designers actively encouraged to submit portfolio submissions for all manner of ID design awards.

To me this shows a real understanding of the designer psyche, which IS ego based (contradicting the above). Stroke a designer’s ego and you will probably get better response to your needs than a big bonus. Seriously, money is good, but showing an interest in THE WORK and value that work enough to encourage it to compete at a regional or local level and you really engage the worker at their more base motivations. Sure everyone wants to be acknowledged for their work, but designers want the world to acknowledge them, not just their boss. In this scenario we get both.

Engaged
This one is a bit flaky (meaning hard to quantify), but I have never felt more engaged. People are hungry for input and feedback to what they are working on no matter how related it is to what you are supposed to be doing.

I have so enjoyed the side conversations about other people’s projects. While there is a distracting element to it, it is also very focusing as well. It gets me to clear my mind of stray thoughts because I get to express similar enough ideas where my swirling “idea engine” gets to calm down. This one might be me, but being able to engage people all the time in this way is so important to my work environment.

No one is inaccessible and everyone seems interested and well Engaged! I guess this last point is apropos because it is the name of my blog.

I do want to add that the current organization has a lot to learn about moving from the inefficiencies of face-to-face engagement to more efficient models that digital modes of engagement can achieve. Wikis, blogs, discussion lists, etc. can go a long way towards increasing knowledge management, engage discussion, and sprouting ideas. I am working with internal stakeholders on developing tools to do just this. To me it looks like a generation gap issue, where you have some MySpace generation folks mixed with some elder statesmen who haven’t caught onto the whole Web 2.0 bandwagon yet. But due to the openness above, there isn’t a lot in the way of getting things done and proving out concepts for future engagement tools.

Symbol > Motorola
I’m very excited for the coming year at Symbol. If things stay the same it will be great, but there is also a lot of unknown as well. The imminent merger with Motorola can mean so much change (or no change at all) and there is not this air that we need to just wait for things to solidify.

I hope that the marketing campaign by Moto is based somewhat in reality. The people I’ve met working on the creative side of Moto have been great, and I hope they are representative of the types of designers I’ll be working with in the future.

I have learned in a short time that Symbol HAS changed the very face of the world with its innovations in the past; and that its current set of skills if added to with good holistic thinking can further revolutionize the world with a host of technologies. The merger with Motorola only makes this even more possible, as more resources, access to adjacent technologies, and less expensive supply chains (bigger bulk) all come together here on Long Island.

What else am I looking for?
The one thing I’m discovering about my current environment is a lack of solution to what we develop. We build hammers. But we don’t tell people what to build with the hammers. This is very similar to what I’ve experienced at Documentum, where we built a platform from which partner/vendors could build almost anything they needed with it within a the scope that the platform supported. This is what Symbol does, but at Documentum, we understood that we had to support and often supply solutions in order to better engage our vendors and to make the experience of our brand through our products better. It is dangerous to leave your brand so loosely in the hands of your vendors.

I hope that through the concept work that I can engage in more holistic solutions, to bring proof of concepts to life and then convert those solutions to sales and partner relations tools.

I enjoy the idea of thinking at a micro level of keypads and push buttons, but am I am into very holistic thinking.

A possible path that I see for myself is one where I begin to curve more and more into a meta-designer that can float between all the aspects of design (at least at the direction level; since craft has such a high learning curve in ID) where someone from UX (software) can be a design lead for product designs just like the IDs are today. We’ll see.

In the meantime, Symbol/Motorola has so many challenges and opportunities that I can see myself in this “house” for quite some time. So far the annoying arbitrariness of bureaucratic corporate life seems to have slipped by me so far. Hopefully it will stay that way.

I’m sure this space will contain more thoughts on what it means to move from the soft to the hard side of things. Stay Tuned!

Vibez is a new MP3 player by European Disk/Memory/USB drive maker Trekstor. I haven’t seen these in person yet, but the look is really different take on the very basic makeup of the iPod pattern structure. Nicely done (in spirit).

I like the idea of a more rubberized “moving” wheel which might even be easier to use if done right and get rid of the problems people have with a synaptic touch pad wheel.

Like I said .. “in spirit” … I think this has promise. A tad pricey though.

Often in my reading of design literature I come across the phrase “encouraging ”, especially in architecture. Recently, I was reading BusinessWeek’s Architecture Award’s selection and a few times I read that phrase. Whether it be “encouraging creativity”, “encouraging collaboration”, “encouraging productivity”, etc.

This use of the term “encouraging” to discuss how a specific spatial design can elicit more of a behavior type, struck me as being very “interaction design” oriented. It implies that a space (in this case) can have qualities, functional and aesthetic that change the behaviors of the human beings in it.

The examples in architecture are clear:
Bloomberg’s new headquarters (a place I got a chance to tour while being interviewed there) is completely transparent. Every wall except for the border walls of infrastructure and the adjacent neighbors are all made of glass, thus transparent. There are no offices with doors of any kind and even the conference rooms have glass walls.

In this case Bloomberg, as a communications company, is turning its transparency of information, into reality for all its employees, creating a space where communicating and sharing are primary to work behavior.

Microsoft recently created some re-designed spaces. They broke away from their classic, “Everyone with their own doored-office” model which is great for work that is focused, to an open environment that engages collaboration, teamwork and creativity.

Google’s headquarters is famous for eliciting creativity, but doing the usual open space concept for collaboration, but also aesthetically uses the vibrant colors of its logo in furnishings and other accessory details, as the use of primary colors create a more playful environment and causes us to access creativity centers in our mind.

Ok, so that’s architecture (and probably interior design). What does this have to do with interaction design?

Well, this blog is called “Engage”. It is for a reason. I believe that good interaction design should “engage” users. But that is an overly generic statement in that not all interaction solutions require engagement. Some infact require invisibility, or worse repel.

But how do we do this? What is our “open space” and “color”? What are the patterns or UI elements that we can use to better “encourage” activities? I believe there are some elements to the answer here in the Captology work by BJ Fogg at Stanford University around “persuasion” but also believe there is more here.

Think about game play and how that engages, discourages, encourages, dissuades, rewards, etc. Points, goading, death, etc.

These types of interaction models can encourage specific behaviors, some are desirable and some are unwanted either by stakeholder or direct user.

Could it be that a knowledge management system with folksonomy functionality added encourages more collaboration amongst peers both on and off the system than one without it?

It seems that most of the discourse of IxD has been centered around ease, simplicity, and desirability, but are there other types of emotional or behavioral responses around engagement we would hope to achieve? What are the building blocks to achieve those behaviors?

In the IA community they often speak about how the spatial metaphor is a direct translation to the “architecture” part of their work. While I only half-heartedly see the metaphorical connection, I actually see a lot of affinity between the emotional connections people make to space and objects and the same connections people make when using digital/virtual products.

Anyone have further thoughts about this?

Last week, I wrote a short blurb referencing Jonas Löwgren’s article describing pliability as a type of aesthetic for interaction design. Here I expand a little more on the topic with some of my own ideas.

As a refresher, Jonas uses the word “pliability” to describe the quality of an interaction where there is an immediate appropriate reaction to the physical action a user takes. The more immediate (tight) this action is, the more pliable it is.

One of the great examples he gives it the use of a mouse drag to move a map in Google Maps. Mousedown > move mouse and the map moves along with you. Compare that to the Mapquest model and the idea of pliability becomes really clear. In Mapquest, you move a map by clicking on arrows that surround the map. Mousedown > wait for system refresh > page reappears recentered towards the direction you gave.

This mode is not only not pliable, but is also disruptive. the GMaps way allows the user to always remain in context to the movement as opposed to the more jolting MapQuest approach.

Taking this a step further …

Recently, I’ve had an opportunity to get my hands on a Zune. This is Microsoft’s entry into the MP3 player market. Now, this isn’t going to be a critique of the Zune, there are too many out there. But I did want to compare a core differentiator between the Zune and the iPd (I just got an early Chanukah present toda-a new iPod Video)–that is the navigation method.

Zune uses a classic 5-button dialpad that most people with a cellphone have experienced for the last umpteen years now. The iPod has the covetted, award winning click-wheel. The “wheel” concept has been at the core of the iPod experience since its inception. The “wheel” is also a GREAT example of pliability. A move my thumb in a direction and the appropriate action occurs.

You could say that the D–pad on the Zune is just as pliable. I hit down and the selector goes down. I click up and it goes up, right?

But where the iPod has an increase in pliability is in the wheel to software interaction around the speed of circular movement. The faster I go around the wheel the faster the selections move. This acceleration of physical action directly impacting the acceleration of a corresponding and appropriate virtual response to me is the epitome of the definition of pliability.

Pliability when applied to RIAs has a lot of contexts to focus on. Google Maps is an obvious posterchild in tihs regard taking pliability almost as far as the iPod click wheel. The problem with the Google Map version is that I can only move in spurts equal to the size of the visible portion of the map. What might be more interesting is some type of infinite navigation method that does not require a “reload” of the mouse.

But pliability does have degrees, and we don’t have to be perfect with it. Just by using an RIA technology to reduce the number and amount of page refreshes will increase pliability and create a more positive affect around the use of your designed solution.

A great example of this is the ratings on Netflix. Further on Flickr is the ability to add/modify your title and description easily and add annotations to images. These interactions have a much more pliable interaction model than one that didn’t use an RIA-based solution.

I’ll be giving an updated and revised version of my “What is rich? Why do rich?” presentation next month for UPA Israel on Jan 9th @ 6:30p. The link below has the announcement in Hebrew. I hope to have it in English soon and will post here. My talk will be in English.

See the event announcement: (It’s the first time I’ve seen my new name, “Malouf”, in Hebrew Leters; I’m barely used to it in English.)

Jonas Löwgren, mentioned in an earlier posting this week, will be discussing aesthetics of IxD, at a presentation to the Sweden IxDA local group in Stockholm, Sweden on Dec. 11.

Here’s the announcement.

Wish I could be there.

Listen to the podcast interview of my partner in AJAX Design Crime, Bill Scott (Yahoo!) and me answer some great questions from the likes of Jared Spool and Joshua Porter of UIE and Bokardo fame, come and listen to this podcast. Hopefully it will give you just a taste of what Bill & I will be offering people who come to the Web Application Summit at the end of January in beautiful Monterey, CA, USA.

There is also a text transcript for those who only want to read and don’t want to listen. (G-d! I hate the sound of my own voice!)

I just wanted to point people to this very well done presentation by the design team responsible for the new, low-cost MOTOFONE by Motorola for developing countries.

What’s been interesting is how much initial reaction from the design community has been, “When will you release it here?”.

Disclaimer: Sometime early next year Motorola is going to be my new employer as they recently acquired my current employer, Symbol Technologies. I had nothing to do with this project but am excited that my new company is this dedicated to design and design research and integrating the Industrial Design and Interaction Design practices.

2006 by David Armano and his readers

David Armanom, of Logic+Emotion fame, put together a great presentation of what 2006 was all about from an Experience Design perspective. Enjoy!

You can look at the presentation above and also read the intro article (also available in PDF).

Oh! and I’m one of the many people whose quotes were used. Shoot! I even got in there twice!!!!!

It is rare that I post a reference to Jakob Nielsen, but this latest Alert Box is worth a read. Nothing “new”, but brought all together nicely.

To put it simply, “Progressive Disclosure” is just a design pattern of deciding what needs to be in the primary context of use, and what is secondary or even tertiary and can be disclosed within the same context but only on request explicitly or based on a change in the variables in that context do to adjacent related interactions.

This is one of the main reasons that RIAs are so powerful. They help designers balance power and ease by allowing the designer to prioritize important bits of information to a context based on use.

A good read.

Finally! a GREAT!!!! example of a quality of interaction design aesthetics explained. In this case by Jonas Löwgren of Malmö University’s School of Arts and Communication.

Jonas wrote the article a while back, but I finally got to it this past week with my new long commute. This is one of the first theoretical articles about the aesthetics of interaction design I have read in a long time that I feel I can put to practical use almost immediately.

The article requires a good read by itself, but Jonas is using the term pliability in a very interesting way. I do have to remove myself from the word a bit and just go with it. I kept saying if this was called “Foo” would it still make sense, and the answer is definitely YES!

But the gist of it is that “pliability” in my best interpretation means the direction level of connection between a user’s physical action (type, click, drag, scroll, etc.) and the systems virtual reaction to that action. That tightness of this event can correlate to the positive affect with the system as a whole.

How does this translate to direct practicality?

For me as someone who is teaching design of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) I see directly how this quality interaction can directly help you determine what types of RIA design patterns you might want to employ, or even how/why these patterns improve the design of an application at all.

I’m going to delve deeper into this question soon, but right now, I’ll let people just catch up to me and read this really great article.

Thank you Jonas. It is great fodder for even more thinking on the qualities of interaction design aesthetics.